Due to population migrations, Shtokavian became the most widespread supradialect in the western Balkans, intruding westwards into the area previously occupied by Chakavian and Kajkavian.

The process of linguistic standardization of Serbo-Croatian was originally initiated in the mid-19th-century Vienna Literary Agreement by Croatian and Serbian writers and philologists, decades before a Yugoslav state was established.

[15] Throughout the history of the South Slavs, the vernacular, literary, and written languages (e.g. Chakavian, Kajkavian, Shtokavian) of the various regions and ethnicities developed and diverged independently.

[25] The term Serbo-Croatian was first used by Jacob Grimm in 1824,[26][27] popularized by the Viennese philologist Jernej Kopitar in the following decades, and accepted by Croatian Zagreb grammarians in 1854 and 1859.

[37] During the 13th century Serbo-Croatian vernacular texts began to appear, the most important among them being the "Istrian land survey" of 1275 and the "Vinodol Codex" of 1288, both written in the Chakavian dialect.

[41][42] The Shtokavian dialect literature, based almost exclusively[citation needed] on Chakavian original texts of religious provenance (missals, breviaries, prayer books) appeared almost a century later.

[43] Both the language used in legal texts and that used in Glagolitic literature gradually came under the influence of the vernacular, which considerably affected its phonological, morphological, and lexical systems.

In 1850 Serbian and Croatian writers and linguists signed the Vienna Literary Agreement, declaring their intention to create a unified standard.

In 1861, after a long debate, the Croatian Sabor put up several proposed names to a vote of the members of the parliament; "Yugoslavian" was opted for by the majority and legislated as the official language of the Triune Kingdom.

The Austrian Empire, suppressing Pan-Slavism at the time, did not confirm this decision and legally rejected the legislation, but in 1867 finally settled on "Croatian or Serbian" instead.

[47] During the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the language of all three nations in this territory was declared "Bosnian" until the death of administrator von Kállay in 1907, at which point the name was changed to "Serbo-Croatian".

[52] The totalitarian dictatorship introduced a language law that promulgated Croatian linguistic purism as a policy that tried to implement a complete elimination of Serbisms and internationalisms.

The evidence supporting this claim is patchy: Croatian linguist Stjepan Babić complained that the television transmission from Belgrade always used the Latin alphabet[57]— which was true, but was not proof of unequal rights, but of frequency of use and prestige.

[64] Official languages were declared only at the level of constituent republics and provinces,[65][66][67] and very generously: Vojvodina had five (among them Slovak and Romanian, spoken by 0.5 per cent of the population), and Kosovo four (Albanian, Turkish, Romany and Serbo-Croatian).

[94] Outside the Balkans, there are over two million native speakers of the language(s), especially in countries which are frequent targets of immigration, such as Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, and the United States.

In practice, the writing system does not take into account allophones which occur as a result of interaction between words: Also, there are some exceptions, mostly applied to foreign words and compounds, that favor morphological/etymological over phonetic spelling: One systemic exception is that the consonant clusters ds and dš are not respelled as ts and tš (although d tends to be unvoiced in normal speech in such clusters): Only a few words are intentionally "misspelled", mostly in order to resolve ambiguity: Through history, this language has been written in a number of writing systems: The oldest texts since the 11th century are in Glagolitic, and the oldest preserved text written completely in the Latin alphabet is Red i zakon sestara reda Svetog Dominika, from 1345.

These digraphs are represented as ⟨ļ⟩, ⟨ń⟩ and ⟨ǵ⟩ respectively in the Rječnik hrvatskog ili srpskog jezika, published by the former Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb.

[97] Montenegrin alphabet, adopted in 2009, provides replacements of sj and zj with an addition of acute accent on s and z, forming ⟨ś⟩ and ⟨ź⟩ in both Latin and Cyrillic, but they remain largely unused, even by the Parliament of Montenegro which introduced them.

However, migrations from the 16th to 18th centuries resulting from the spread of Ottoman Empire on the Balkans have caused large-scale population displacement that broke the dialect continuum into many geographical pockets.

The primary dialects are named after the most common question word for what: Shtokavian uses the pronoun što or šta, Chakavian uses ča or ca, Kajkavian (kajkavski), kaj or kej.

The Serbo-Croatian dialects differ not only in the question word they are named after, but also heavily in phonology, accentuation and intonation, case endings and tense system (morphology) and basic vocabulary.

In the past, Chakavian and Kajkavian dialects were spoken on a much larger territory, but have been replaced by Štokavian during the period of migrations caused by Ottoman Turkish conquest of the Balkans in the 15th and the 16th centuries.

"[111] In 2017, numerous prominent writers, scientists, journalists, activists and other public figures from Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia signed the Declaration on the Common Language, which states that in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro a common polycentric standard language is used, consisting of several standard varieties, such as German, English or Spanish.

While it operated, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which had English and French as official languages, translated court proceedings and documents into what it referred to as "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian", usually abbreviated as BCS.

[147] A more detailed overview, incorporating arguments from Croatian philology and contemporary linguistics, would be as follows: The topic of language for writers from Dalmatia and Republic of Dubrovnik prior to the 19th century made a distinction only between speakers of Italian or Slavic, since those were the two main groups that inhabited Dalmatian city-states at that time.

However, most intellectuals and writers from Dalmatia who used the Štokavian dialect and practiced the Catholic faith saw themselves as part of a Croatian nation as far back as the mid-16th to 17th centuries, some 300 years before Serbo-Croatian ideology appeared.

And indeed the complete identity in the language of all our oldest poets does not allow us to separate Dubrovnik from the rest of Croatian Dalmatia, if we say with Vuk that only the Chakavians are Croats, that exactly then this name is appropriate primarily for Dubrovnik poetry, because it is completely based on the Chakavian dialect, which is so naturally the case, as if a daughter is born from her mother Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski as a proponent of the Illyrian movement before Jagić in 1854 also explained:[164] When I speak of our literature, I mean Croatian literature, which we can be proud of in every sense, even though the Serbs have been wanting to vindicate [appropriate] it for themselves for some time.

It is true, that in recent times we have denied ourselves and neglected our name by adopting the Illyrian name, but we have done so only for the sake of harmony and for the sake of fraternal common progress; but when the Serbs do not want to know about this noble goal, then let each one simply follow his own path to the common goal and do not push us off the path that our ancestors conquered and occupied with great spiritual and physical strength.

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Serbo-Croatian, written in the Latin alphabet:[a][182][183] Sva ljudska bića rađaju se slobodna i jednaka u dostojanstvu i pravima.

Ona su obdarena razumom i sv(ij)ešću i treba jedni prema drugima da postupaju u duhu bratstva.Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Serbo-Croatian, written in the Cyrillic script:[a][184] Сва људска бића рађају се слободна и једнака у достојанству и правима.